Monthly Archives: July 2011

The social media world continues to rapidly change and will keep changing for years to come. The current dominators of social media are Facebook and Twitter with Google+ starting to become a presence worth noticing. Since Google+‘s debut a mere three weeks ago, there have been plenty of comparisons to Facebook and Twitter. Is Google+ a Facebook killer? Is it a Twitter killer? Mike Elgan of ComputerWorld seems to believe that Google+ will effectively incapacitate Twitter in the next few years. I personally find Twitter to be very cumbersome and strange to use since they have such a low character limit. I tend to write a lot so it’s always a problem for me. Even if I want Twitter to go away, it’s not going to go quietly.

Twitter may lack in a few things like their character limits and requiring users to learn their proprietary coding methods, but they have revolutionized social media by introducing the ability to set trends and amplify a message by rapid retweets from the community. The Google+ team is working on ways to provide concise updates according to Elgan which could hurt Twitter. If Google+ introduces their own method of implementing trending topics, Twitter could be in serious trouble.

I really find it hard to believe that Twitter will be taken out by Google+ mostly due to the fact that Twitter managed to get ingrained so deeply into society in just a few years that disintegrating it from everybody’s use will be like pulling teeth. There are many apps out there that help to manage Twitter like TweetDeck, HootSuite, and Seesmic to name a few. The media is actively using their Twitter handles and just about everything and everywhere. With many businesses rooted in using Twitter, it may take a very long time to phase them out.

Google+ is still very new and as good as it is right now, there’s a lot of room for improvement. It’s not better than Facebook or Twitter right now but with time and proper development, Google+ could be the next big thing. As of now, they are still playing catch up and if Facebook and Twitter realizes that, they can use this opportunity to push their initiative further and faster.

As social media continues to grow into a monolithic giant, the need to measure and track the data is also becoming important as well. Klout, is a website that measures the value of a person, personality or brand’s social influence in the digital sphere. Starting back in September of 2009, Klout is attempting to become the standard for measuring social influence of all your social media initiatives. If you haven’t used this yet, the basic idea is that everybody has a Klout score which determines who influential you or your brand is in certain topics and trends in the digital world. The higher your score, the more influential you are in your area.

So what does this mean and how does it affect you? Klout could potentially serve as a means for users online to determine whether or not your content is viable and creditable. With Google introducing there “+1” initiative and adding in Facebook “Likes” and “Tweets” or “Retweets” as a social measure of recommendations, Klout serves as the platform that links all these things together and provides a definitive score on how well all these things are working. Right now many businesses are putting all these social sharing features on their website with the idea of getting their content out to a bigger audience on these social network in hopes that it’ll drive traffic back to their site. With Klout and Google’s latest “Panda Update” making social influence a larger key factor in determining search results, all the social sharing components near serve as a way for users to get quality content based on how many people truly found something interesting and informative.

Social media might be a hot topic right now but I don’t know how long that it will last. It’s definitely something that has forever been ingrained into society only after the last several years but I think the importance of it will be downplayed years from now. It is important but not the end all, be all of your presence online. Quality and unique content is still the primary driving force behind creating a great website. Without that, it doesn’t really matter what you Klout score is. If nobody cares or feel engage with your content, they’ll probably never share it. So for now, social media is a hot button topic that everyone’s scrambling after but it’ll probably be less urgent in the next five to ten years.

I’ve been playing around on Google+ since Friday last week. My preliminary analysis of this new platform was that it’s a cross between both Facebook and Twitter. It’s an enhanced Twitter with it’s sharing capabilities but less social than Facebook. Now that I’ve been using it for several days, I’ve discovered that Google+ is actually much broader and than your average social networking site.

Over the last few years Google has been introducing bits and pieces of what we know today as Google+. Google had launched Google Buzz, then it launched Google Profiles which are both applications that don’t seem to be that connected. Then just this quarter, Google launched their +1 feature which works similar to Facebook’s “Like” feature, allowing users to use that to recommend content that they either like or found useful. Google+ has brought all these apps together and more expanding the reach of Google’s entire network of apps. A PCWorld.com article explained Google+ as “an email service, blogging platform, micro-blogging site, news feed, video conferencing system, chat service, location-based social network and more” and they are exactly right.

My initial experience with Google+ was confusing but after playing around a little bit, the functionality became pretty intuitive. Although Google+ may seem like another Facebook type platform, to me it’s more of a compliment to Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is where all the social stuff happens. Twitter is where people go to get information quickly. Google+ is going to be the place users go to be social and share information. Of course some people may adopt Google+ as their primary social platform of choice but there will still be many people and businesses that continue to use Facebook and Twitter. I guess we’ll see what happens in the next few months. Overall, Google+ is heading in the right direction.